Why Apple built Final Cut Pro X | Hacker News Reader

Why Apple built Final Cut Pro X

sachin.posterous.com

105 pointsmynameisraj68 comments

My guess is that they don't really want to be in the pro apps business. Their pro apps were built or acquired for platform-strategic reasons during a time that the company's future was a fraction as stable as it is now and they don't really fit with the focus of the company.

But it'd be tough on a number of levels to outright cancel such a successful product as Final Cut Pro. And it's beneficial for them to have a stable of very capable media app developers that help drive design of and exercise system frameworks like AVFoundation and GCD and provide code/expertise that trickles down into media apps that are more aligned with the company's focus and main customers.

And I think they do think there's more profit to be made from a much larger audience of prosumer/pro-but-non-top-10-blockbuster-movie-editors. Bet they're right, too.

You don't get the "prosumer/pro-but-non-top-10-blockbuster-movie-editors" without being in the pro apps business. Moreover their pro apps fit the focus of the company, a high end creative company. It's hard to market pro apps to aspiring professionals and prosumers if pros are not using it. Part of Apple's marketing campaign for their pro apps is to show how pros are using their software.

Apple is no longer a "high end creative company". Their business now is making pretty, easy-to-use devices for non-techie consumers. They just happen to still have this vestigial organ hanging off the side.

I don't quite understand why they don't spin their pro apps off into their own company.

Exactly! If they had done this before killing off Shake, I bet we'd still have a half decent competitor to Nuke in the high end compositing space, instead of nothing.

Instead, Apple killed Shake and let big studios buy the source code from them so they could continue to use it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_(software)#History

Apple used the Shake team to build Motion, an application which a much larger user base.

pretty much everyone is on After Effects these days instead

What? Shake was THE node based compositing app!

There is a massive difference to Motion and the highend compositing apps like Shake, Nuke, Fusion, Softimage(Illusion+Matador=FXTree), Houdini(COPS), Flame, Toxik(Autodesk Composite). After Effects and Combustion are time-line based like Motion, but Motion doesn't begin to compare to them. Even Blender has fantastic compositing tools.

Shake was serious business. It's last well known big project was 'The Dark Knight' which Framestore CFC mangled a 64bit wrapper around it to better manage the 8k-frame workload. Shake was ported to Intel, then killed off, with no intention to take it to 64bit. I don't think you can buy the source code anymore.

The Foundry is absolutely kicking everyone else's ass with Nuke. They have an interesting business model as well: don't do much research in house, instead work with studios with big R&D budgets and license their tools when they're mature, bringing it to a wider audience.

They've done it with Digital Domain and Nuke (compositing), Weta and Mari (3d paint), and now Sony and Katana (lighting).

Shake was the king. But now the industries have Nuke. The king is dead long live the king!

Apple isn't so terribly different from other companies its size, it still has empire-itis. There is a fundamental inability of leadership to spin-off parts, to reduce the size of the empire.

You mean something like Claris? Because that didn't quite work out (although it's still alive).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claris

Quite so. "Prosumers" typically over-buy, they buy equipment with capabilities beyond what they would ever need. Often they buy the same equipment as professionals. If the professionals are using something else, prosumers are likely to follow.

I'd say it's not that they don't want to be in the pro apps business per se, so much as they don't want to be a software contractor for big studios, which is what most pro app companies inevitably become. Apple wanted to make big changes, but mostly, big studios / production houses don't want big changes.

Avid probably couldn't make a radically different Media Composer even if they wanted. The risk of alienating current customers is too great, and the resources required to maintain multiple products targeted to the same market are too many.

Wow. Makes so much sense I simply have to comment on it to "bump it up" so others can see it.

Reminds me of what Apple did to the smartphone market. While everyone was busy chasing the enterprise market, Apple built a smartphone for the consumer market. Enterprise customers are consumers too and they brought their "consumer" phone to work. Yada yada... Apple disrupts the enterprise smartphone market.

Also, isn't this just a straight up example of disrupting an industry? When the PC came along, it wasn't as capable as the minicomputer, but it let you have a lot more control over your own environment, and it was a lot cheaper. Or what about desktop publishing versus old page layout solutions. Not as capable, but way cheaper and way easier to use, it ended up completely wiping out the old typesetting systems.

I see FCPX in a similar light. It may not be as capable as the other video editors out there in terms of format support / workflow support (and I include FCP7 in the list of competitors), but what it does do, it does really well. FCPX is blazingly fast compared to the other video editors out there, and that is a killer feature. Over time we can expect Apple to provide better workflow support - they've already indicated that they are adding xml support and a few other things that will go towards addressing many criticisms of workflow changes. Format support, and in particular tape support, may get left behind, but in this brave new world, tape is less and less relevant.

If this is Apple's thinking, I think they're in serious trouble. It sounds to me they're taking how they build the iPhone and iPad and applying it to FCP, and it doesn't work.

There are two types of people: People who pay for video editing software and those that don't. I actually paid for Adobe Elements a few years back. It was painful, but I needed it for a specific reason. But I seriously doubt I will ever pay again (unless it's $2.99 or something). Most people will be fine with iMovie or Windows Live Movie Maker. It does 99% of what you need and braindead simple.

My wife (and her friends) regularly record GBs of video each week. The problem is that nothing in FCPX fixes their core issues -- most revolve around video management, and not actual editing.

There are amateur video editors out there, but I don't think its a growing market. It's not small, but I think Apple is making a poor bet if they think the millions of ppl creating video with their phones and cameras is going to buy this product.

In the end it doesn’t really matter, though. Final Cut’s success or failure is inconsequential to Apple’s success or failure. That might not have been true in 1999 (when Final Cut Pro was first released) but it certainly is today.

Apple’s video software people may be in serious trouble, the rest of Apple is not.

there are amateur video editors out there, but I don't think its a growing market. It's not small, but I think Apple is making a poor bet if they think the millions of ppl creating video with their phones and cameras is going to buy this product.

This is quite possibly the most wrong comment I've ever read on hacker news. every kid on earth with a skateboard or snowboard or BMX bike will be buying this software as soon as they can afford it.

Funny you say that because my neighbor has a half-pipe (apparently, that's how it's spelled) in his backyard and I've never heard his son talk about editing video with FCP. And he actually does have a fair bit of video, as he uses a helmet cam.

But again, for him its usually management (I actually recommended something I saw called Project Odessa to him -- not sure if he's using it though). He does super simple titling, and on occassion a soundtrack. But he doesn't need something like FCPX. And if he did use it, he wouldn't buy it. Give him a copy, and I'm sure he'd use it (if he had a Mac), but free does everything he needs.

This isn't to say that some won't buy it (clearly the singular of anecdote isn't data), but I think its like non-free and non-pro music mixing software. Sure there is a market for it, but its just not huge.

It's a half-PIPE, gramps.

Thanks. The way the kids talk nowadays, you can't really tell what they're saying. :-)

No problem. I don't see how you can think amateur video editing is not a growing market. Vimeo/Youtube seem to contain a lot of evidence to the contrary...

That last sentence of mine wasn't clear. There are tons of people who will edit video and put it on YouTube. That I don't doubt. And most will use free or nearly free software to do so (in a huge number of cases, no SW at all, beyond editing on the actual capture device itself).

$300 is a lot of money to spend on any piece of SW, much less something as niche as video editing. Especially if you were to ask people what feature they want -- all of them are available in free programs.

I have to agree with you, even though it feels wrong to do it. I can provide enough anecdotes to start to blur the line between "data point" and "evidence": I was big into the climbing scene for a few years, as an instructor and manager of a Bay Area rock gym. There are few sports that are as self-promotional as climbing, especially in the pro circuit.

The thing is, every climber wanted to have cool videos of themselves, with great soundtracks and innovative photography and cut scenes and everything else ... but nobody -- really, seriously, almost nobody -- ever did it. Instead, they'd get to the crags and start having a good time and the camera bag wouldn't get unpacked, or the videographer would start climbing too, or, even if they did shoot for day, they never got around to any of the post-processing afterward.

I've also been to skate parks and motocross events and BMX and ... I think I could count on one hand the number of serious video recording I've seen at all of those combined.

On the other hand, I live in a surfing town and a lot of the kids recently have been moving towards OSX and FCP for their movies (the ones that are doing it seriously anyway). Haven't seen a lot of stuff that the skaters do, since most of the skater kids I interact with at work are more into photography rather than film making.

I don't necessarily think that explosive growth of video editing (a sure thing, in my view) is identical to explosive growth of sales of a particular video editing suite, more so if that software develops a bad reputation (as FCPX seems to be acquiring quite rapidly).

Apple can afford to take a risk with FCP because it's absolutely nonessential to their business. If they're wrong then so what? FCPX becomes iMovie 2014 instead. Not even a blip on Apple's financial radar. I do think it's a growing market because video is everywhere these days and most of it (think corporate, political, educational, YouTube, demos for products, video reviews, etc, etc) does not require very high end features. Ease of use, performance, and fast production is what really matters. That's what Apple's betting on. Even if the vast majority of people are using iMovie or whatever the 10-15% who might go buy FCPX is likely still a much larger video than high end professional video editing.

If they're wrong they they tarnish the FCP brand.

More than that, they tarnish the Apple brand.

That brand is one of the most valuable in the industry today. Apple can execute well but a lot of their success comes from their brand.

  > Apple can execute well but a lot of their success comes
  > from their brand.

It's the other way around. The big part of the brand was created very recently. Starting with iPod and then exploding with iPhone and iPad. It's only the four years since the first iPhone appeared. Do yourself a favor, find that 1997 WWDC Jobs' talk and watch it. He knew what he was doing 14 years ago.

It goes both ways. Apple builds their brand via successful execution and then they extract value from their brand in the form of higher profit margins, faster selling curves, etc.

I think you may be proving my point for me though. Apple has always relied heavily on their brand, but while Jobs was away their brand took some major hits, even while they had many sound examples of solid execution. It wasn't until Jobs returned and began reinvigorating Apple (with iMac, OSX, MacBooks, iPod, iTunes, etc.) that the damage began to be repaired and the modern Apple brand began to take hold. Even so, it's taken a long time for that brand to translate into the degree of customer loyalty and trust that exists today. Apple could quite easily tarnish their brand with a few key missteps (such as foisting low-quality software on the top tier professionals in a high visibility industry) and thus reduce their profits by far more than what they would gain in sales on a shoddy product.

But FCP is essential to the business of many professionals. And FCP, as a carbon, 32 bits only app, was in a dire need for a cocoa upgrade for years. Unsurprisingly, the professional crowd is not very happy.

My problem with the change in FCP is that it's following an unpleasant downgrade pattern on their platform. QT 7 was far more useful than QTX. 10.6 & earlier Mail is far more robust than 10.7 will be. And it goes on.

Apple's really pushing a premium consumer biz model, leaving professionals in the uncomfortable position of not having a professional platform.

I think that the response of pros to FCPX is understandable but also wrong. If FCPX were the first word processor, they're complaining that it doesn't come with liquid paper and two color ribbons.

The way in/out points and compound clips work in FCPX is simply ridiculously awesome -- it's kind of what After Effects tries to do with compound clips implemented in a realtime modeless manner.

Was Apple insensitive (e.g. by halting FC Studio sales the moment it released FCPX)? You bet. Did it bungle the PR? No question. Is FCPX a non-pro tool? Pro tools are tools pros use. I have no doubt some pros will use FCPX and some FCPX users will turn pro. Will a lot of FCP7 users cling to the old ways or switch to Premiere or Avid or whatever? Probably.

"The way in/out points and compound clips work in FCPX is simply ridiculously awesome"

You mean, the way it forgets the in/out points you set on a clip? Yeah, I LOVE that. So much more fun to re-trim each and every clip every time you click on it. Huge timesaver. /sarc

Obviously I do not mean that, but your point is well-taken.

Creative professionals have been a cornerstone of Apple's business for many years now but the signs all point to Apple's abandonment of this market. It's understandable from a business standpoint; their consumer business is far more profitable, but a lot of tears are going to be shed over this. They've let Logic fall far behind the competition since they acquired it too.

What’s your problem with QTX and Mail? The new Mail is awesomely awesome (the old is rubbish in comparison) and QTX is a player like QT7 was. Not much to do wrong.

And more importantly QT7 is still available in 10.6 and QTKit automatically invokes QT7 instead of QTX when necessary.

QT7 is available if you know about it and either download it or install it from disk.

QTX / QTKit don't provide a way to:

- save in formats other than H.264 for iPhone or computer

- select datarates other than 2x for iPhone or 1x computer

- export just the audio

- export a still / image from your video

- do simple in/out copy/paste editing

QT7 pro had far more possibilities than QT X. It's largely used by professionals.

How, precisely, do you know how "robust" 10.7 Mail will be?

You don't.

Looking further into the new Mail I was wrong. I had thought it was going to be dumbed down to be more like iOS Mail.

I used to work in the post-production industry here in Chicago, specifically as an editor. I can't think of any well known commercial post-houses that abandoned Avid for Final Cut Pro completely. I know plenty of shops that USE FCP along with Avid, but the risk was always too great to fully abandon a platform that was proven to work (most of the time).

I can't speak for feature film editors, but virtually all of the commercial film editors I know still, to this day, use Avid for most of their projects. Editors are a finicky bunch, and I can certainly see Apple realizing that to truly compete in that market, it's all or nothing. The problem with FCP was always the uncertainty of it, hence the reason Avid is still in use at most shops, despite the fact that editors love to bash it.

As time marches on, I can see where FCP might, yet again, be at the forefront of innovation. The problem is, busy editors don't REALLY want innovation. They want proven systems that work. I think Apple made the right choice.

The article doesn't say much beyond the speculation already running rampant in the blogosphere. "Apple doesn't care about the pros", "They are a hardware company so they just want to sell boxes" and so forth.

What I think the article did miss is the recent FAQ announcement by Apple detailing where they intend to take the software from here. I'm not a video editor, nor do I play one on TV, so I can't speak to how that addresses the wants of the pro audience, but they are at least making an attempt to explain how they will be incorporating pro needs into future patches. How that turns out, is a completely different question.

you miss the overall trend: Apple phased out the XSAN hardware, XServe, they terminated Shake, one of the most advanced fx creator in the industry. That's consistent over the years. What's obvious is that Apple cares about creatives (design consultants, video freelancers etc.) but do not care about corporate video producers.

I have to ask. When a newbie goes to the Appstore looking for video editing software and they see the bad rating, who is actually going to buy the software. Plain and simple, I think that Apple just blew this one.

It makes sense. With all the great competitors why would Apple throw money after aging software.

With Adobe you can work in any of Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Premiere. With FCP it's just that little bit harder. So if you can't match the features of your competitors, make one that will outperform everyone.

Essentially: Speed, simplicity, beauty, and most importantly the illusion that the software is doing your work for you.

The author left Apple in 2008 while the FCP X project just started, I don't think he is the best person to know 'Why Apple built FCP X'.

Can someone write about what's going on? Is it the same type of stuff that happened to the XServe line?

There are various issues. One of them is that FCPX doesn't suport tape decks as well. That feels more like what Apple did with USB and floppy drives: jettison tech on the way out while it was still useful in some contexts. Jobs has said many times he is only interested in technology in the ascendency, and tapes are definitely not that.

It also doesn't support a few pro workflows I don't understand (multiple camera editing, etc)... seemingly because the new interface is a radical departure. It uses a single, treelike track instead of multiple tracks, and doesn't easily map to these workflows. This to me feels like an "Innovator's Dilemma" situation: the new interface does many things overwhelmingly better, but has important regressions.

The regressions will be fixed or outweighed in time. For now (perhaps not for long) other software, including the previous version of Final Cut, compares favorably.

Multi camera editing is coming, and the tape deck stuff looks like it will be handled by a company that will do it better than Apple (although a plugin costing > 2x the program is kinda weird). The sound export stuff is a great biz opportunity for a plugin writer.

They needed to rebuild for 64-bit. This is what you get when you start over. I expect that patches and new plugins will turn it around by next year.

Lost in all this is the incredible Motion 5 at $50. Learning that and selling some templates (with decent Parameter Rigs) for Final Cut Pro X users would seem to be a nice way to make some extra cash.

The latest version of Final Cut dropped a bunch of features that are vital to pros and focused more on features that are useful advanced amateurs. Basically if you used Final Cut to edit home movies and amateur film productions then the new version is vastly improved. If on the other hand you used Final Cut to earn a living editing feature length movies and television productions, then the new version is a bit of a complete disaster. I guess Apple figured that there wasn't enough money in the pro market, and decided to double down on the enthusiast and advanced amateur market.

Also, they've been working on FCPX for two years, and needed to ship. Even if it wasn't quite ready for pro usage.

Why ship a product that doesn't meet the needs of your customers?

Isn't that the general philosophy of HN? Fail fast and iterate until you hit customer fit.

... and focused more on features that are useful advanced amateurs

I actually don't think this is quite right. I'll quote Gary Adcock's Macworld review:

"Most of the features introduced in FCP X are welcome and badly needed. Some are long overdue. Still, others are positively jarring and require a change in mindset to appreciate."

There is no doubt that Apple made it unusable for high-end pros (for the time being, at least) but I feel they also added many things that high-end pros would have really appreciated, had they been able to use it seriously. So it's not quite as simple as "amatueurs only" (even if you're talking about advanced amateurs.)

That also explains why professionals were going absolutly wild at that National Association Of Broadcasters event where Apple demoed Final Cut Pro X for the first time.

They liked the new features and interface changes they saw, they liked the complete rewrite (64 bit, much faster, background rendering) and, most importantly, they didn't know which features would be missing.

They should have done a graceful transition, i.e. they should have continued to support and sell FCP7 while also testing the waters with FCPX. This would have also allowed them to frame the product differently: “FCPX is the future and already has nearly everything professionals need to edit videos. If it doesn’t yet have a feature you need you can continue using FCP7 while we work as fast as we can on adding those features.”

The transition is just too rough.

If it doesn’t yet have a feature you need you can continue using FCP7

Except, apparently, you can't buy FCP7 any more (at least that's what I've heard from one guy I know in the industry). Which means that if you're a Final Cut Pro house and need to hire more staff, I guess you're kind of stuck going the pirate route for getting editing software for your new employees.

Sure, that’s exactly the problem. I was writing about what Apple should have done, not what they actually did.

Good catch - people will just pirate FCP7 which Apple won't care at all about (unless FCPX flops).

I don’t think companies would dare and pirate software.

It seems to me that the ascendancy of the Mac in the last ten years has a lot to do with them being in the "pro space" -- specifically software and web development pro space -- and being one of the best.

The geeks, that is, the mavens and influencers, folks whom others when to for advice about what computer to buy, were buying Macs because it really was such a nice environment. It still is.

Their strategy for ipod too reflects this as well: target the well-heeled, early adopters, people who like to chatter about their toys. Make the brand desirable through organic PR -- that is, build a truly desirable product even if it's not quite at a mass-consumer price point, and let the pent up desire sell the lower end, targeting various price points with well-vetted technology and UI.

I don't use Final Cut Pro, but it sounds like they're taking a different tack than usual. I don't understand it. This article didn't help.

Interesting, looks just like Cyberlink's PowerDirector.

Seem to be ðe same idea behind Gnome.

Makes me wonder about the future of Logic Pro. Most of the Logic team has been occupied working on Garageband for iOS.

That post is very obnoxious. it mentions why apple won't do several things, and make it seems cool while not doing it, but fail to tell one thing it bothers to actually do.

At the end of the read all i know is it doesn't have features, it doesn't support any format... but it does it well so because of that I should buy apple.

I don't buy it.

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